Listen While You Tie: John Gierach Talks To Tom Rosenbauer

There probably aren’t a lot of fly fishers who don’t know John Gierach’s work. Author of “Trout Bum”, he’s probably one of our sport’s favorite curmudgeons. This Orvis podcast provides a rare interview with the man who tends to shy away from online media (unlike most authors he has no FB, Twitter, Instagram, or even a WordPress he maintains). It would be a lot of fun to chat with Tom Rosenbauer (who I’ve met before and liked immediately) and John Gierach (who I’ve never met but would probably get along with) and this is probably the closest I’ll get to it.

Rosenbauer talks to Gierach about a whole slew of things, including his thoughts about online fly fishing media. John doesn’t sound like a fan, and isn’t interested delving into it any more than that, which is a little discouraging from those of us who enjoy sharing our work online. I think anyone can admit that between all of the new fly fishing magazines and blogs that there is a lot of good stuff out there that people are doing on their own dime. JG is an author though, and likewise isn’t a big fan of giving his work away for free, but who is unless you’re trying to break into the business?

I have found likewise that traditional fly fishing authors just aren’t fans of the blogging world. I have even seen some online fly fishing magazines say they dislike bloggers altogether, which is hard to understand because most of us write because it’s fun and what was out there in fly fishing in print just wasn’t very good (oh, Fly Fisherman is taking a trip to some water a thousand miles away only accessible by float plane again and it’s for trout? sounds great…).

However, I don’t think it’s just John Gierach who doesn’t care for online fly fishing media. I met Robert Demott recently at an NKFF club event where he was promoting “Astream” (I bought a copy BTW) and when someone introduced me to him as a writer he came across as nice, but a little dismissive. Overall, that’s understandable. I’ve not published anything and what I have written probably isn’t that good and my work as prolific as I’d like it to be.